This is me wearing my welcome face and yes, I do look a bit smug but it was a happy day. That means I was in good company and one of my favourite people took this picture. Do you have a day that you can still smell when you see a picture of it?

You’ll seldom judge any book by its cover, so I’ve made 3 Chapter Previews of everything freely available from this site. In addition and because you’ve taken the time to drop by, you will also find a complete copy of Fanore just for you. Incidentally, if you’re new to e-Books, I strongly recommend the Aldiko Reader. It’s also free and small enough to quickly install on mobile and compact devices.

People are like books and are seldom what they seem, even when we think we know them. The thing is, people hide aspects they don’t want us to see, which is pretty much the way we all operate. Most of us also like to think that we live at the centre of the universe and believe it or not, maybe one of us does.

Some people can appear damaged but can be surprisingly strong when they need to be. It’s not unusual to discover that many ‘so called’ handicapped people have personally developed ‘alternate’ faculties or senses to make them ‘enhanced’.

Places are shallower and easier to see but what you see in a place is also seldom what you get. Take this sedate looking stretch of water behind me as an example. It looks like any beach along Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way and it is, but only for now. You see, a moment to us can be a lifetime to something else and an age to our world is long enough for us to crawl out of the mud only to become extinct.

Some really powerful winter storms regularly move layers of sand around my beach to periodically reshape it. The rocks behind me can be fully covered with sand some years and then stripped bare again in others, like this year.

The currently ‘sandy’ end of the beach that I’m facing has also lost some cover this year. This has exposed patches of a long lost bog that the sea apparently likes to play peekaboo with.

In that, now saline bog, is a section of petrified interglacial forest. A shallow dig (using hands only) will easily expose oak branches that are many thousands of years old and which grew in forests that never saw people.

The fact is, God or Destiny doesn’t seem to have decided what my beach will ultimately be. The petrified forest beneath it also holds evidence of starting out as a primeval tropical swamp. However, that was long before it was covered by a glacier, which melted due to climate change. That created an environment in which the forest could live long enough to become a bog. All that melt water is still raising ocean levels, so this place is only a beach temporarily. Tomorrow, it could be totally submerged to make a reef, for a while. I wonder if any of us will be around to see that.

The point I’m making is that creation is still a work in progress and it seems to use evolution, amongst other things, as its agent to build our physical world. Some people might prefer to see creation as a metaphysical god using angels to create the world but in either scenario, elementary sub-atomic particles swap places and energies to pose awkward quantum questions for science.

My books cover Science Fiction, Fantasy, Spirituality and I liberally mix these genres with history and astronomy, though I do insist on keeping everything very real. I don’t do zero to warp 10 in two seconds flat while firing all phasers and re-loading photon torpedo tubes. Everything must work and if it doesn’t work today, it must still be viable to make the stories credible.

I do believe in people and I can ‘see’ someone walking this beach when it becomes a mountain. I hope he or she will spare a thought for us, who will make them possible, just as our primitive ancestors gifted us to the world and hopefully, to the wider universe.

I like to write about vast changes but also about the flawed people who bring them about. I will narrate small changes that profoundly affect only us, while our world simply ticks over like car at the traffic lights, oblivious to our fundamental revelations.

That is hopefully some food for thought that you will take with you - as you continue through this ‘Welcome Portal’ to the other pages of this site, or to my Blog or Facebook Page. I do hope that you will enjoy your visit and please feel free to share your thoughts and/or comment but if you’re busy, then no worries. Another time perhaps.

If you just stopped by to download your 3 Chapter Mini-E-book Previews of each of my published books, or to get your free copy of my Fanore Novella, just go straight to the book covers above or use the navigation panel at the top.

If you do have another minute then let me share some more ‘Insights’ into how I go about doing what I try to do on the next page.

This me in ‘Create Mode’

and no, I don’t always have a sushi break. I just have the perfect BFF.

Thanks Gina. Maybe in some dim and distant future, when evolution has almost run its course, most women might be something like you. Then again ... maybe not, there has to be some limits, right?

By the way, this is the little room at the back of our house where assumptions are dissected and where new worlds must occasionally be created to accommodate the results.

It also looks like something from a very laid-back community radio station.

Now where’s that

’On-Air‘ light switch?

I put this little weather widget here where Gina and I can always find it before heading out for the day or hanging out the clothes to dry.

Someone once told me that there’s there’s no such thing as poor weather, only our often poor choice of what we wear in it.

Better safe than sorry.

Ver_Nov_b_2018 Copyright (c) Denis McClean

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